This is the way the world end
by butterfly collective
Summary: It's in the not so distant future when mankind is about to wipe itself out and a group of humans who survive must grapple with good versus evil. Just borrowing Stephen King's fine characters for fun.


The sleepy town of Arnett, Texas had never seen so much action.

Stu Redman had overslept the next morning after the night's events had kept him at Hap's gas station longer than any of them wanted. After the ambulance had carted off what was left of the dying man they tersely referred to as John Doe and his dead family, they had tried to settle down with another six pack of beers Norm pulled out of the cooler.

The beers had mellowed them out enough so they could head on home after closing the gas station and cordoning off the damaged pump with some rope. There hadn't been much talking between them after what they'd seen, a young man looking like death from some bad ass disease no one could name.

They could only guess.

Cholera? Plague? Food poisoning from bad chow at a truck stop?

The only words they had gotten out of the man drowning on his own mucus and steeped in delirium was that he'd run away from something, something called "project blue".

He thought about that and the bleak look on the man's feverish face as he drifted off to sleep.

The next morning, the sunlight streamed through the blinds in the bedroom window, the one which he had shared with his wife before she passed from cancer. He got dressed and went to the diner to get a scramble of eggs and some grits.

He ran into the usual crowd before he'd catch up with Norm and Vic and the others at Hap's gas station. Last night, Hap had said he'd start the paperwork for filing his insurance claim in the morning.

Sally, the waitress had a cigarette between her lips as she refilled coffee cups. She brightened when she saw Stu. They'd been out together a couple times but it hadn't lasted.

"Hey what's up Stu?"

He sat at the counter.

"Not much…Arnett's still here.."

She nodded.

"Barely…they keep telling us it'll get better soon but we both know better."

Stu couldn't argue with that. He'd been unemployed from the factory since it shut down two years earlier and had been doing handy man work when he could find it.

She gave him his coffee.

"I heard what happened at Hap's station."

Stu sipped from his cup. He imagined she and most of the rest of Arnett had by now. The town didn't have a daily or even weekly newspaper since the last one had folded but then it didn't need one.

"Guy from out of town just crashes into one of his pumps and drops dead?"

"Something like that."

She shook her head.

"Those out of towners into all kinds of lifestyles," she said, "heard he had a wife and kid."

Stu remembered what their bodies had looked like dead and cloaked in an awful stench inside the car. He'd never forget them as long as he lived.

"County coroner trying to ID them to contact family…"

The license had read Charles Campion and Hap had found some military ID with his photo on it in fatigues with a no nonsense look on his young face. Much different looking than how he'd been last night.

Stu figured that maybe the guy had taken his family and gone AWOL from some army base miles away and it wasn't his place to wonder why. The poor guy and his family, all dead now miles away from anywhere.

Jim Bob from the State Police had warned all the men the next day to lie low in case the dead guy turned out to be contagious. A couple of the men had sneezed during that conversation and then taken themselves closing the gas station for a day thinking they all had summer colds.

"Those summer colds are the worst," someone had said.

Stu didn't remember who but he alone among the men had felt just fine. But the back of his neck crawled anyway not because of what happened in his home town but what had happened in his dreams.

The dark man had come calling at various times in his life. When his dad died broke, then when his brother had been killed in a car accident after riding a successful scholarship out of Arnette and making the perfect lifestyle for himself in the Midwest.

The last time had been when his wife had died of cancer two years earlier. But more lately, he'd dreamed of another person who didn't scare the wits out of him. That had been an old and very sagely Black woman, one hundred years old or so, who soothed him with words strummed to an old guitar that she lived in Nebraska's cornfields and she'd be seeing him soon.

Along with others…

Stu had no idea what it all meant but then he was just another good old buy in a dying town, meaning in terms of the economy.

Soon he would found out that It had another more ominous meaning as well.

* * *

Frannie Goldsmith cried a lot. She dribbled tears when she was happy and howled when she was sad. People living in her hometown Ogunquit on the coast of Maine noticed it since she'd been a little girl who broke into tears on the first day of kindergarten.

She sat on the pier after Jesse her preppy grad student boyfriend left her after she wept while telling him that he'd knocked her up. The pill she'd taken to stop her ova from being cranked out like an assembly line and well…she saw his face grow ashen as she shared some of the anatomical details of its conception.

She knew that her child had been the Chosen One. She didn't know what that meant exactly because billions of babies were born every day but somehow she knew that the zygote which had attached itself to her body like a parasite was very special.

The little old lady sitting on the front porch in her dreams had told her so. She had been the one who had told Frannie to ditch the sperm donor and embrace the celibate life. Frannie thought it'd been too late to do that but she listened to the woman's advice in her dreams.

Because of the hormones fluxing in her body, she would cry a lot more tears more often but she figured the world would just have to get used to that. She would be the mother of the most important child born on the planet.

She returned home where her father slaved in his garden mostly to get away from his wife's latest attempts at castration. He'd been trying to plant some roses and Frannie in between steamy trysts with Jess and crying jags had been helping him out.

"Oh Daddy…like I just told you, I'm totally pregnant."

Her father had been holding his chest as if he were having a heart attack.

"Oh Frannie, you were supposed to save it until marriage."

That seemed odd to her. Why if she were meant to have the most important baby known to mankind would she not have sex?

"Daddy I thought I loved him well kind of," she said, "but this baby's going to be really, really important."

"How so my child…?"

Frannie wiped the tears threatening to spill from her eyes.

"I don't know…but I just know…know what I mean?"

But her father just looked perplexed and returned to the roses. Then Frannie heard the sound of a bike peddling up the drive.

Damn, it must be Harold Lauder, the pimply assed know it all kid brother of her best friend Amy who used Frannie as his inspiration for all that time he spent in the bathroom lately.

"Frannie…Frannie…I hoped I'd find you here."

She sighed, her shoulders sagging as she turned to face him.

"Hi Harold…what's up?"

He blinked his eyes behind his glasses and then pushed them up with his middle finger.

"Oh…nothing…I just thought you might want to go to a poetry reading tonight that's all."

She sighed again, more dramatically.

"Gee Harold, Amy and I are going to watch some exotic dangers at the Vibe," she said, "Maybe some other time?"

But Harold's face had already flushed and he threw up his hands.

"Fine…I'll ask you out later…"

Then he got back on his bike and pedaled off. Frannie just shook her head feeling mildly creeped out by Amy's kid brother. No reason to be Ogunquit was filled with people to put between her and Harold, right?

Above her a crow circled ominously before it fell out of the sky with West Nile.

* * *

All away across the country and deep beneath the surface, a command base monitored the spread of what was called Project Blue with some concern. The projections at 24 hours, 48 hours, a week after the initial case of patient zero which was the AWOL Campion and things looked bleak. Oh yes the virus had mutated somewhat from the toxic cloud which had snuffed out a bunch of scientists in a laboratory but that meant that it'd just take longer to kill people, that's all.

As General William Starke told his men including his right hand man, Manor Len Creighton as they gazed dispassionately through the eyes of a surveillance camera at the sight of a man who croaked while eating chicken goulash.

"Most people are going to think they have the plain old normal flu until the end."

Wasn't that the bitter truth, he moaned to himself. They'd start out sniffling and their eyes watering and not covering their noses and mouths or cleaning their hands which mean they'd spread the disease before it intensified. It jumped through the population so quickly, hell some god forsaken town in East Texas named Arnette or something would be quarantined even though Starke knew it was much too late for that.

"We can stop it sir," Creighton said, "We've got roadblocks and quarantine signs everywhere."

Starke sighed. The disease had a communicability rate that matched that of its mortality at about 99.9%. He wanted to shake the truth into Creighton but he settled for a softer approach.

"You understand what that means Any chance we had of containing it went by the boards when Campion bought his first take out hamburger."

The major gulped loudly.

"Oh dear God," he whispered and then he knelt on the floor 30 feet below a dying earth and started to pray for humanity to rage, rage against the dying of the light while his boss rambled on about Yeats.

Like that, the world began its ending.


End file.
